I struggled with anxiety for many years. I have done therapy and meds, but it wasn’t until I started seeing a life coach that I really started to shift my anxiety. I will outline three of the strategies I have used to decrease my daily anxiety and improve the quality of my life. I hope it will do the same for you.
1. Flip the Script
The first strategy towards immediate relief was to change the way I thought about my anxiety. I had always thought of it as a problem or an indication that something was wrong with me. I thought it meant that I couldn’t have a ‘normal’ life. I thought it meant that I couldn’t have as good of relationships as other people. So every time I started to feel anxious, I would then freak out and have anxiety about my anxiety. Thus doubling the amount of anxiety I was feeling. When I stopped categorizing my anxiety as a problem, I was able to remove the extra anxiety that I was heaping on top of the original anxiety. The anxiety just was and it didn’t mean anything about me or my life. It is just a normal human emotion. I am not a lesser person for experiencing it.
2. Recognize Your Rabbit Holes and Avoid Them
The second thing that I was doing that was causing me extra unnecessary suffering was engaging with the anxious thoughts. When I first started dating my partner, we would meet every Tuesday night to go country dancing. Every Tuesday during the day I would start to feel a little anxious about that evening. When I started feeling anxious, I took that feeling seriously and started contemplating what might be wrong. I would end up in a paralyzing anxiety spiral thinking that this might be the day he just doesn’t show up. I had no indication from him that this would happen. Yet, I was still paranoid about it happening. Instead of questioning why I am having this thought and is it likely to be true, I engaged fully with the thoughts. I imagined in my head what it would be like to go there and wait only to have him never show up and ghost me. I indulged in imagining the pain and humiliation of being stood up. I took my anxious feeling seriously as if it was an indication that something was wrong instead of recognizing that it was my thoughts causing my anxiety. My optional thoughts. My thoughts that had no basis in reality. My thoughts that were based on what I saw as the worst possible scenario. I eventually came to the realization that every week I had this same anxiety and every week my anxiety was wrong. What I had worried about happening, had never happened. This realization alone was not enough to make me stop feeling anxious.
What helped was when I decided that this was just how Tuesday felt. So on Tuesday when I started feeling a little anxious about the evening, I stopped wondering why I was feeling anxious. I just accepted that it is Tuesday so of course I feel this way. This is how Tuesday feels. This helped me stop going down the rabbit hole of imagining worst case scenarios and engaging with the anxiety. After a couple of weeks of doing this, the Tuesday anxiety disappeared completely. And it has never come back.
3. Find the Facts
In every situation there are the facts and then there is the meaning that you are giving those facts. The facts are boring. The story is the drama. Separating the two can be very enlightening and can help bring down the anxiety. Consider these two stories:
Story 1: My partner hasn’t responded to that meme I texted him. I bet he is mad about something. What could he be mad about? Did I do anything? Did I say anything? Did the meme offend him? Maybe he is sick of me. I bet that is it. He is going to break up with me I just know it. I am just not good enough. He would like someone prettier. Or more fun. I wish I hadn’t sent that text.
Story 2: I sent a meme through text at 10:12 A.M. As of 4:37 PM on the same day I have not received any reply to the text.
The circumstance is the same in both stories above. One is filled with story and one sticks only to the facts.
If you can find the facts and pull out only the facts it will take the drama down. The anxiety lives in the drama. I like to pull out the facts and remind myself that everything else is optional story. That I get to choose what story to tell myself if I tell one at all. I remind myself that the facts are the facts and they don’t have any inherent meaning. This has been incredibly helpful in preventing me from getting sucked into my own internal drama all the time.
In combo these three approaches have drastically reduced the amount of anxiety I feel on a daily basis. I continue to try and refine other approaches and will be sharing as I learn and discover more.
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This post was previously published on Change Becomes You.
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